The Case of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. VERY schoolboy knows, even if in sketchy outlines, the political history of the conflict over slavery. Accounts of the slave trade abound, and a beginning has been made in the study of plantation society. But scholars and historians have until recently virtually neglected the life and behavior of one important segment of that society-the slave himself. All too often the discussion of slavery has been carried on in terms of stereotypes about the Negro slave that had no existence outside of the minds of white men.What did it mean to be a slave, to be a marketable chattel, to suffer inescapable caste status, to work without wages, to be driven often without mercy and forced to accept the appearance, the idea of inferiority? How did it feel? What hopes and fears stirred in the minds of these illiterate and brutalized men? What feelings lay behind their murderous and abortive revolts? When they were forced into submission and disingenuous cooperation what was the nature of their tenuous "adjustment" to slavery? Or having fled the plantation, what had slavery done to their personality and behavior? These are questions that only the slave himself could directly answer. To discover the answers to them is to see in human terms what slavery entailed. Happily, there are many biographies and autobiographies of slaves extant.' These accounts, (called "slave narratives") whether dictated, ghosted or written by the subjects themselves, are noteworthy for the facts they reveal in regard to both the plantation system and the personalities of the slaves molded by the system.

A ‘disguised scheme for compensated emancipation’: Accounting for gradual abolition in nineteenth century New Jersey

“…Frederick Douglass, who as a young adult escaped his enslaver in Maryland in 1838, wrote several autobiographies and sold them in England, Scotland and the U.S. to raise funds for pro-abolition activism, including the publication of anti-slavery newspapers and pamphlets. Many enslaved and freed people wrote narratives about horrific experiences of slavery in the United States, including Solomon Northrupkidnapped as a free man in the North and enslaved by southern planters for 12 years -Harriet Jacobs, and William Grimes (Grimes, 2008;Jacobs, 1981;Northup, 1968).…”